Attitudes and beliefs mediate the effects of cognitive and moral predictors on green behaviour

This research aims to investigate how attitudes and beliefs mediate the relationship between cognitive and moral predictors of green behaviour and consumers’ intentions to visit green hotels using the partial framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and the Value-Belief-Norm Theory (VBN). The data was collected from 387 tourists residing in the hotels of Shimla and Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India, through a site visit survey. A purposive sampling technique was used to collect the data, and PLS-SEM was used to test the proposed hypotheses with the help of SmartPLS 4.0. The result provides partial support for the proposed integrated framework, which reveals that cognitive and moral predictors of green behaviour significantly influence tourist attitudes, specifically their ecocentric attitudes. However, several hypothesised direct relationships were not supported. On the other hand, cognitive predictors have the ability to diminish beliefs through their interaction with moral predictors. The visit intention of the tourists is found to be positively influenced by attitudes, whereas it is adversely impacted by beliefs. Besides, both ecocentric and homocentric attitudes and beliefs are observed to mediate the relationship between predictors and visit intention, although several indirect effects were not statistically significant, indicating differential mediation across the proposed pathways. These findings, thereby, provide an important implication for the individual, manager, policymaker and society by enhancing understanding of the factors that influence tourists’ behavioural intention to visit green hotels.